by Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh
* * *
ABIGAIL’S PARTY
Contents
Introduction by Mike Leigh
Abigail’s Party
ACT I
ACT II
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ABIGAIL’S PARTY
Mike Leigh trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, at Camberwell and Central Art Schools in London, and at the London Film School.
He has written and directed over twenty stage plays. These include Babies Grow Old (1974), Abigail’s Party (1977), Ecstasy (1979), Goose-Pimples (1981), Smelling a Rat (1988), Greek Tragedy (1989), It’s a Great Big Shame! (1993), Two Thousand Years (2005) and Grief (2011).
His first feature film was Bleak Moments (1971). This was followed by the full-length television films Hard Labour (1973), Nuts in May (1975), The Kiss of Death (1976), Who’s Who (1978), Grown-Ups (1980), Home Sweet Home (1982), Meantime (1983) and Four Days in July (1984).
Other feature films are High Hopes (1988), Life is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993), Secrets & Lies (1996), Career Girls (1997), Topsy-Turvy (1999), All or Nothing (2002), Vera Drake (2004), Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), Another Year (2010) and Mr. Turner (2014).
Introduction
‘It isn’t the done thing!’
This neurotic mantra echoed mercilessly throughout my suburban childhood and teenage years. My parents were obsessed by it, as were so many well-meaning but misguided mums and dads of the stultifying postwar years. Of course, what we were unable to understand or consider at the time was the brutal chaos and insecurity the Second World War had inflicted on their lives. They’d been to hell and back, and now they hung on relentlessly to an idea of an unshakeable order and material respectability. Behave! Conform! Don’t step out of line! Wear a tie! Use Brylcreem! And of course we war babies, who were the repressed teenagers of the 1950s, became the generation of boys and girls who literally let our hair down in the so-called ‘swinging’ sixties.
But The Done Thing didn’t go away. By the late seventies that tame aspiration of the 1950s to ‘Keep Up With The Joneses’ had given way to an aggressive consumerism of a new and much uglier and more cynical strain. People hadn’t been inherently selfish in those post-war years. But now, many were becoming so. Enter Margaret Thatcher.
From time to time it has been suggested that Abigail’s Party is, or was, a ‘state-of-the-nation’ play. Maybe it could be called one; it’s not for me to say. Certainly, if I’d set out deliberately to create such a work in 1977, which happened to be two years before Thatcher came to power, I’d have failed miserably. Instead the play came from my intuitive sense of the spirit and the flavour of the times, and from a growing personal fear of, and frustration with, the suburban existence.
Having, as best as I could, thrown off my suburban and provincial shackles at the tender age of seventeen, I’d enjoyed a healthy decade and a half or so of a relatively alternative and bohemian metropolitan existence. But now Alison Steadman and I had married, moved to a north London suburb, burdened ourselves with a mortgage, bought a semidetached house (albeit a pleasant Victorian one), and were busy acquiring all the usual goods and chattels respectable Guardian-reading types acquired.
Although we two were hardly Beverly and Laurence, through this new kind of existence, involving values and people I was now having to be a part of, I inevitably felt, if subconsciously, that I had somehow taken a step backwards, into the dreaded world of The Done Thing.
In fact, all my plays and films have, at one level or another, dealt with the tension between conforming or being your true self, between following the rules or breaking them, and with the problem of having to behave the way you think you’re expected to.
Anarchy versus respectability haunts Bleak Moments; Nuts in May pitches the hypocritical moral highground against honest unpretentiousness, and Meantime and High Hopes both deal with intelligent young outsiders confronting those safe suburban values. The central protagonists of Naked and Happy-Go-Lucky are both questioning and anarchic, but whereas Johnny is burnt up with inward-looking frustration, Poppy is an optimist, who knows how to channel her feelings positively and responsibly. And the tragedy of Another Year is Mary’s horror of middle age, and the growing realization that she can no longer live up to her received image of how to be gorgeous for men.
Consider even my period films. Topsy-Turvy is fundamentally about the pain behind the mask, while the eponymous Vera Drake is a very respectable woman, motivated by the highest of morals to break the law. And J. M. W. Turner was the ultimate outsider’s insider, part of the Establishment, yet breaking all the rules in the book.
Although Abigail’s Party was by no means my first work (it was in fact the twenty-fourth), it does perhaps earn the status of being the mother of all my studies of The Done Thing.
Beverly is an aspirational working-class girl who is totally preoccupied with appearances and received notions of behaviour and taste. A bundle of contradictions, she espouses the idea of people freely enjoying themselves, yet endlessly bullies everybody into doing what she wrongly thinks they’ll enjoy, or what is good for them. But, whilst she may be perceived as monstrous, she is in fact vulnerable, insecure and sad.
Is Laurence from a working-class or lower middle-class background? If you met him, you might not guess, but I’d suggest it was the former. Now he and his prize-catch wife are on the way up, materially successful (with a struggle), sexually and spiritually unfulfilled, and at odds about pretty much everything. He yearns for the highbrow, but she just wants a good time – and goods.
Angela and Tony, both also working-class, are essentially honest and unpretentious. Both have respectable jobs. But will they in time fall prey to The Done Thing? At the moment, they’re having that classic of tough times with their new house, the mortgage, acquiring their stuff and the rest of it, and they are inevitably a touch out of their depth in their new neighbourly roles.
Shyness and self-consciousness are responsible for Tony’s aggression, and underneath Angela’s apparent silliness is the tough, practical reliability of an experienced working nurse. One knows that before long they will become responsible loving parents, unlike Beverly and Laurence, who are locked into their loveless battle for ever – or would be, if Laurence were not doomed to his sudden and untimely end.
The successful parent is Sue. Or is she? Her eponymous daughter is the crusading descendant of all us rebellious teenagers. Yet Sue, middle-class, genuinely honest, but fearfully polite, has seen better times, does not want to be at Beverly’s cosy get-together, and is battling bravely.
In his infamous review for the Sunday Times, Dennis Potter accused Abigail’s Party of being ‘based on nothing more edifying than rancid disdain, for it is a prolonged jeer, twitching with genuine hatred, about the dreadful suburban tastes of the dreadful lower middle classes’.
It goes without saying that this deeply offensive rant reveals Potter not only as understanding neither the play nor its world, but also of having no sense of humour – which is to say, no sense of humanity. For Abigail’s Party goes beyond being a comedy: it is a tragicomedy. For me personally, it is very much a play about ‘us’, not ‘them’. It is obviously sympathetic to all the characters, whatever their foibles, not least Beverly. And if it works – and the general consensus would appear to suggest that it does – it does so precisely because you the audience experience them in a real, three-dimensional way. These are people that we recognize and understand. The play is both a lamentation and a celebration of how we are, but it is not a sneer.
Returning to my own feeling about suburbia, I feel obliged to confess to a whole other matter. Look again at my films, and in many of them you might detect what, I have to admit, is undoubtedly a d
eep-seated nostalgia for quiet Saturday afternoons, silent back gardens, cars parked in empty streets, even twitching lace curtains. In the end, our native world is in our bones, like it or not – and, in truth, I do. (And I don’t!)
Early in 1977, I was planning a BBC Play for Today with the producer Margaret Matheson. (In due course, this would be Who’s Who.) Out of the blue, I was invited to have lunch with Michael Rudman, the Artistic Director of the Hampstead Theatre in north London, and his General Manager, David Aukin.
But I didn’t want to meet them. I was preoccupied, not only with the film, but with doing up the house, as Alison and I had decided to try for our first baby. Besides, I wasn’t interested in making another theatre piece – I was now committed to film.
Nevertheless, I went. Apart from anything else, I am always on for a lunch, and this was to be in an excellent Chinese joint in Belsize Park. Michael and David are great guys, whom I hadn’t met much previously, and we all hit it off immediately. They explained that they had a problem. They’d had a successful run of shows, so had accumulated an unprecedented surplus. But under the rules, if a theatre made such a profit, they were obliged to give it back to the public funder, the Arts Council of Great Britain.
So would I like to help them spend the money by doing one of my ‘improvised’ plays? They could offer me ten weeks’ rehearsal and a cast of up to five, the only proviso being that I had to say yes or no, here and now, before I left the restaurant.
I told them emphatically that it was quite out of the question. I was busy, and that was that. But these were persuasive men and, course by Chinese course, they wore me down, and finally I agreed.
I went home. I’ll do it and get it out of the way, I told Alison. It’ll just be a stopgap. It’ll sink without trace. Then we’ll be able to concentrate on the things that matter.
Then I suggested that Alison be in it. She hesitated. She really wanted to devote time to domesticity. But as it was to be a quick, forgettable job, she relented.
So we set about making the play. As usual with my work, it would be constructed from scratch in the rehearsals, through improvisation, discussion and research. Nobody knew what it would be, or what it would be about, but it would open on a certain date, and we would be left alone to get on with it, with no interference from Rudman and Aukin. They were very clear about this, and they were as good as their word.
But they did say one other thing. They pointed out that productions did regularly transfer from Hampstead to the West End, and it would be great to have a show that could achieve that. I took this completely on board: I decided to subvert the traditional French-windows, cigarette-smoking ‘boulevard’ comedy, but instead of the comfortable happy resolution characteristic of such pieces, things would somehow go horribly wrong.
Alison and I were joined by our old friend Tim Stern, who had been a student with her at East 15 Acting School, and had recently played his cockney spiv version of the cat in my Dick Whittington at the Royal Court Theatre. I had just seen the great Janine Duvitski being brilliant in a television drama, and John Salthouse usefully brought along his early experiences as a Crystal Palace junior.
Our fifth collaborator was Thelma Whitely, who had lately and impressively played a doctor in Trevor Griffiths’s television play Through the Night, in which Alison had scored a success as the central character, a young mastectomy patient, caused severe distress by insensitive hospital treatment. The set designer was Tanya McAllin, and Lindy Hemming designed the costumes, beginning her and my long-term collaboration. This culminated in her winning the Oscar for Topsy-Turvy.
During the preparation, Alison observed a woman rather aggressively demonstrating cosmetics at Selfridges – the source of the lipstick scene. And she and Tim visited the Ideal Home Exhibition in character. All went well until Tim was persuaded to fill up a questionnaire by a man flogging mortgages. When he was asked his occupation, he realized he was perpetrating a howler: as an estate agent, Laurence would simply have walked away at the outset.
Janine visited a couple of hospitals, and John learned about computers. Then, late in rehearsals, Jonathan Miller, theatre director and doctor, was brought in to check out the heart attack. Curiously, and not at all usefully, he delivered a superfluous lecture on stage heart attacks and Chekhov, and told us that nobody drops dead so instantly from a cardiac arrest. (Not only is this not true, but Alison had seen a man die precisely thus at Euston Station only a few weeks earlier.)
Abigail’s Party opened on 18 April 1977. It was a smash hit, the hottest ticket in town. So successful was it that Rudman and Aukin decided to revive it later in the year, over the summer. Again, it was a sell-out. Now no fewer than seven West End managements wanted to transfer it.
But we had hit a snag. The nuisance was Alison’s and my other successful project. She was pregnant. No way could she do a West End run, and naturally I wouldn’t contemplate her being replaced. Our doctor said she could do four weeks, no more. But this was plainly no use to a commercial producer.
This seemingly intractable situation was suddenly solved by the inspired Margaret Matheson. On seeing the play, she simply said, ‘Let’s do it on television.’ A drama she was producing about Northern Ireland had just been cancelled ‘for political reasons’, and she had an empty studio slot.
Initially resistant to this good idea, being rather stupidly purist about theatre and television being quite different things, I was soon persuaded by just about everybody that it would be for the best.
And so, immediately after its double run of 104 performances at Hampstead, Abigail’s Party was wheeled into the TV Studios at White City, lock, stock and barrel – or nearly. For byzantine copyright reasons, the BBC insisted I change some of the live music integral to the action. Thus Elvis was replaced by Tom Jones, and José Feliciano by Demis Roussos.
This was of course a colossal compromise. Tom Jones just isn’t the same thing as Elvis Presley. (He, incidentally, died during the Hampstead run, resulting in our having to rewrite the references to him.) But, replacement though he was, Demis Roussos became, after the television broadcast, so inextricably associated with the play that I now allow stage revivals to feature him. (If you’re doing so, replace Laurence’s ‘that blind Spaniard’ with ‘that fat Greek’).
It was a great success on television. There were heated exchanges in the letter columns about whether you should or shouldn’t put Beaujolais in the fridge, and as to whether Alison was pregnant.
The show was screened again, and yet again, always on BBC1. In those days there were only three television channels in the UK, and this third transmission coincided with an all-out strike on ITV, the commercial channel, and with an esoteric, highbrow programme on BBC2. Moreover, tempestuous storms raged throughout the British Isles that evening. So sixteen million viewers stayed at home and watched Abigail’s Party.
While it is gratifying that this unexpected exposure resulted in the play becoming celebrated as a classic 1970s television programme, it is equally satisfying that it has enjoyed a healthy life as a much-performed stage play.
There have been literally thousands of productions around the world, professional and amateur. It was voted number sixty-six in the National Theatre’s Poll of the Best 100 Plays of the Twentieth Century; and at the time of writing, there are successful productions running in Paris, New York and São Paulo, with a major revival being planned for the West End.
Forty years on, I reflect on this unintended ‘stopgap’, in which I had no interest, and which I was sure would sink without trace. Had I pondered it longer and more seriously, I might perhaps have attempted that ‘state-of-the-nation’ play. But good fortune intervened, and the world was mercifully saved from that unquestionably dreadful fate.
Mike Leigh, December 2016
Abigail’s Party
First performed at the Hampstead Theatre, London, on 18 April 1977, when the cast was as follows:
BEVERLY Alison Steadman
LAURENCE Tim Stern
ANGELA Janine Duvitski
TONY John Salthouse
SUSAN Thelma Whiteley
By Mike Leigh
Designed by Tanya McCallin
Costumes by Lindy Hemming
Lighting by Alan O’Toole
In a later revival at Hampstead Theatre (from 18 July 1977), and also in the television version transmitted as a Play for Today on BBC-1 on 1 November 1977, Harriet Reynolds appeared as Susan.
Abigail’s Party was evolved from scratch entirely by rehearsal through improvisation.
ACT I
Early evening in spring
ACT II
Later that evening
Time – the present
Act I
Laurence and Beverly’s house, the ground floor. Room divider shelf unit, including telephone, stereo, ornamental fibre-light, fold-down desk, and prominently placed bar. Leather three-piece suite, onyx coffee-table, sheepskin rug. Open-plan kitchen, dining area with table and chairs. Hall and front door unseen.
Lights up.
Enter Beverly. She puts on a record (Donna Summer: Love to Love you Baby). Lights a cigarette. Places a copy of Cosmopolitan in magazine rack. Pours a gin-and-tonic. Gets a tray of crisps and salted peanuts from the kitchen and puts it on the coffee table. Sits.
Pause.
Enter Laurence, with executive case.
LAURENCE [kissing her]: Hullo.
BEVERLY: Hi.
[Laurence puts case on armchair.]
You’re late.
LAURENCE: Sorry? [Laurence turns down music.]
BEVERLY: I said, you’re late.
[Laurence pours himself a scotch.]
LAURENCE: Yes: sorry about that – unavoidable.
BEVERLY: What happened?
LAURENCE: Oh, some clients, they were late.
BEVERLY: Laurence, don’t leave your bag on there, please.
